Conventional wisdom says to read a journal’s back issues before you send them work so you can get a sense of what they publish and whether your stuff’s a good fit. The same advice is often given to folks shopping around a chapbook or book-length manuscript: read what the press has done before. It’s good advice—when it’s possible. That’s easy for free online journals, for instance, and even many print journals, small presses, or paywalled online publications have free samples available.

In other cases, though, the only way to read past issues is to buy them. While I’m in favor of supporting small publishers in theory, my budget and bookshelf space also aren’t infinite. Granted, there are other ways around this conundrum. You could only submit to places that do have work available on line, for instance, or you could just say fuck it, send your stuff anyway, and hope for the best. There are other ways to get a sense for a journal’s tastes too, though, ones that don’t involve spending any money. Here are some things I’ll often do when I want to scope out a journal, anthology, or press to decide whether it could be a good home for my work.

We’re in the middle of an open call for After Happy Hour, which means I’ve been reading a lot of submissions lately. The variety of stories that get submitted to us always makes it an adventure to read the slush, and it’s usually one I enjoy. For the most part, the stories people send us are fun to read. A lot of the things we reject are good stories at their core that either just don’t fit the aesthetic of the journal—or, more often, that are a draft or two shy of being completely finished.

I think every writer has sent out stories too early at some point. I’ve definitely been guilty of it—I’ll finish a round of edits, think the story’s finally done, and send it off. Then I reread the story after the rejections come in and realize I’m glad those editors said no, because the piece definitely isn’t as good as it could be.

I took last week off from posting because I was on my way back from the annual AWP Conference, which this year was in Kansas City. We decided to drive since we were bringing along bunches of books to sell—and, on the plus side, we did sell bunches of them, which didn’t make the 12-hour drive any shorter but did at least make it feel worth it.

I love conferences, and the AWP conference in particular—I’ve been to most of them that have happened over the last 15 years. What I love about it being such a huge conference is that you really can tailor your experience to what you need in that moment, and that plus the moving location gives each year’s a slightly different feel.

Getting feedback from a workshop group or beta reader can be a great way to refine and polish your writing in preparation for submitting stories or poems to publishers.

Journals that have a feedback option, on the other hand, offer you a different kind of insight. It’s a way to hear straight from editors who choose the work for journals, anthologies, and other publications. At minimum, they’ll give you some insights about why they rejected the piece, and usually they’ll offer some other tips about areas you can improve, to increase your odds of getting an acceptance the next time you send it out.

One of the cool features of publisher databases like Duotrope, The Grinder, and Chill Subs is that they give real-world data about journals, like the average response time and acceptance percentage. This info doesn’t come from the publishers, but from submitters who use the submission trackers on these sites.

The response time part of this is usually pretty helpful. Even if there are only a few reported responses, you can get a sense from them of how much the journal’s response time varies, and a rough time-frame—at least whether you’ll be waiting a few days, a few weeks, or a few months.

The acceptance ratio can be a trickier wicket, however. When you’re looking at this kind of data, having a small sample size can dramatically skew the results. Who you’re sampling to collect that data makes a difference, too.

Editing a literary journal gives me a unique insight into the publisher’s side of the process. Even so, though, that’s just one journal, and while I’ve read for a few others in the past, I also know that each market has its own unique process for reviewing submissions and deciding what to publish.

Luckily, a lot of publishers are also very open and transparent about what they want to see from submitters. One great place to find this info is using Duotrope’s Editor Interviews. For anyone who’s not familiar with Duotrope, it’s a searchable listing of presses, journals, magazines, contests, and other places publish creative work, and is a handy tool for figuring out where to send stories and poems.

Like most things in the world, the publishing landscape has changed dramatically since the dawn of the internet. That change has happened at an inconsistent pace, though. Some established publishers stuck by their old school print-subs-or-bust guns until the 2010s (and print subs are clinging on by their fingernails even today), while other journals have been online only since the early aughts.

This inconsistency has led to some conflicting advice for writers submitting their work. Some things that used to be must-include formatting or info is now seen as antiquated, and including it makes you come across as out of touch or ill-informed.

Any writer who regularly sends out their work has no doubt come across a few contests along the way—and some of these don’t come cheap. The typical entry fee I see for contests is in the $10-$20 range, but I’ve seen entries as high as $50 a pop, and it’s fairly common for contests for book-length manuscripts to have entries of $25 higher.

This leads to the natural question: is it worth it? Sure, someone’s going to walk away with a pretty good payday—but that’s true of Powerball drawings, too, and no one’s ever said playing the lotto regularly is a smart financial decision.

I have a few manuscripts I’ve been shopping around to agents and presses: A linked short story collection, a speculative micro-fiction chapbook, a 200,000-word sci-fi novel—in short, not the types of projects most publishers are look for.

This has, naturally, gotten me thinking about self-publishing. Especially since I know a good number of people who have done it successfully: My partner self-published his novel, Hungry, through Amazon; a member of my writing group released his comic book series, Theme of Thieves, with funding from Kickstarter; another workshop colleague serialized his novel on the now-defunct platform JukePop, leading to its eventual publication by Spaceboy Books as Lars Breaxface: Werewolf in Space.